It certainly would have been a more flexible experience! I have a friend who frequents a coffeeshop I hang out at who I have been teaching Python and misc. hacking to. I ended up giving him the chromebook, and he's set it up with ubuntu (both by dual booting and through booting of a thumb drive!). So I definitely appreciate and accept the flexibility of ubuntu on the chromebook.

If you want to say it's "better," I'd ask "to what end?" I personally really like the security model of ChromeOS and having working 3G drivers was a huge benefit when I was experimenting with this setup. I love having a secure client I can trust to connect to sanctioned dev environments on. It's much harder for me to vet that my ubuntu rig hasn't been root-kitted vs. trusting the block-level cryptographic hashing on ChromeOS.

I think this is probably where most people would call me a tin-foil hat weirdo, and I wouldn't disagree. This might be just a fun exercise to think about right now. However, I think it's an increasingly important factor in considering personal computing setups and it definitely played into my choice of platform on the ChromeBook. Plus, it's also just plain cool to see how much mileage you can get out of just chrome + ssh!